Last weekend our home was ready to be formally introduced to our new friends. Into our small apartment we gathered some of people who we have met through the web, French class, expat meetups, and at work. We filled our fridge full of Belgian beer and served it in the collection of specialised glasses that we have collected over the months. We ordered in sushi and Adrian baked pizza. It seemed to be a good recipe for a fun night. So many people, like ourselves, arrive in this country with limited social networks. We were glad that we were able to provide a forum for expats and locals to meet and exchange stories. We had people born in thirteen different countries, many of whom speak English as a second (or fifth) language. Hopefully this will just be the first of many shindigs that we can host in our new Belgian nest.

Wednesday, November 5 was my last day as a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington. We went out to Lydia’s Last Lunch at Serafina with current and past lab members. I had some delcious trout, and they gave me a lovely card:

“thank-you for all your help and for answering all my questions… thank you for teaching me awesome Australian words: arvo! I will miss you! You’ve always had a smile and a kind word to share. You know how to distract me when I’m nervous (i.e. you let me rattle on about my cats)… we’ll miss you.. We are sad to see you go!… I have enjoyed and learned a lot from our many conversations… Thanks for all your support to me, especially when things have not been going the best. Your positive attitude and kindness have been very helpful so many times.”

I may never again walk through the university library, watch the squirrels hide and recover acorns, see the mountain behind the fountain, celebrate a birthday with cake, or a paper with sparkling apple juice. We have made so many wonderful friends here in Seattle. Now I am leaving my career at the bench behind, and looking forward to a rewarding future in clinical trials.

Today is October 15, the National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the USA. I have watched family and friends try to piece themselves together after these tragedies, which are made all the more difficult as often an answer cannot be found to the question “why?”

As a scientist, I know that thorough analysis of health issues begins with a quality data set. The S.3142 and H.R. 5979 Stillbirth Awareness and Research Act sets out clear requirements for each state to record pregnancy and infant loss in a systematic way, which will help researchers establish a national database to look for patterns and common threads between cases. This is the first step in identifying associations, which can lead to causes, then treatments, and then cures. I hope that the US government will find time to pass this Act amongst all the election and financial chaos.

Here are the people with whom I have been working with for the past 18 months. I especially admire the grad students. Here in the US, people generally work as technicians for a few years before starting grad school, a process that takes 5 – 7 years. So I am actually younger than all the PhD candidates in the lab. Still, they keep at it every day, and don’t seem to be in any rush to leave. They always have time to listen to my stories or look at my data, and work at their science with a smile.

And this is the view from our lab: